Eros in America: Freud and the counter culture

Proceeding from the curious case of the meteoric rise and subsequent legal suppression of EROS Magazine, an expensive, hardcover, color-illustrated quarterly magazine printed and mass marketed throughout the United States in 1962, this dissertation examines the significant impact Sigmund Freud's repressive theory of civilization had upon successive generations of U.S. public intellectuals and thus upon the 1960's Counter Culture they helped to create. Part One traces the intellectual history of the Freudian left from 1908 through the early 1960's, examining closely writings by Freud, Emma Goldman, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Erich Fromm, John Kenneth Galbraith, Herbert Marcuse, and Norman O. Brown. Part Two performs a close reading of the extant four issues of EROS, during which I argue that both the magazine's widespread popularity and its harsh legal suppression were both due to its polemical advocacy on behalf of a psychoanalytically-informed rebellion against an overly repressive mainstream culture.